“The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.” Elizabeth Hardwick

#BookReview : Arjuna by Anuja Chandramouli

29Jan

After reading The Palace of Illusions I was captivated by Draupadi and Arjun’s relationship and that is why when Arjuna came up for review I did not have to think much to take this book up for review. Indian mythical writing is the lastest thing on the block, everyone seems to be writing on it thanks to Amish Tripathi for starting the trend. There is always the risk of failing miserably when it came to trying to peg this right.

Arjuna is about the Pandava prince Arjun and his Pandava brothers and the events that occurred in their lives but from Arjun’s perspective. The story starts when Ved Vyasa asks his disciple to narrate the epic to Janmajaya who is the great grand son of Arjuna. To see this from the birds eye perspective, there is nothing new to add to a much loved and known epic other than the modern perspective that was adopted. What the author has not done is draw conclusion on what is popularly perceived. This is one of the thing that makes the book stand out but there is not much you get out of it and you wonder why the story is even retold because there is nothing to add to it.

There is not much to write about the book mainly because it is something you have watched on TV and read in history books. If I say that Pandavas were treated as humans with vices as opposed to the Godly characters we have known them to be, it wont be different because the same treatment has been given in so many other books before. It is the story we have grown up with, it is something we know in and out and the challenge is do the same thing differently, something which has not been done before, that is where this book failed. I felt there would be much about Arjun and his equation with Draupadi or his war strategies and his take on Mahabharata which did not really turn out the way one would expect.